Flying Toasters

High-flying NewTek, whose Toaster revolutionized video production, is screaming to the next level.

December 1993. Another Silicon Valley-style Christmas party. In fact, this party runs a whole weekend. It starts Friday morning with a wakeup show – San Francisco radio personality and former Midnight Blue producer Alex Bennett, live. Friday night, dinner at a Japanese steak house and then a screening of Wayne's World 2 at a local theater. Saturday night, there's a VIP reception in the Television Museum, followed by a 500- member guest list Christmas party in a Faux Winter Wonderland, with breakfast omelets served at 3 a.m. for the true party animals. John Dvorak is chatting with Emmanuel Goldstien and Penn Jillette while Santa's Elves sling shooters.

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What makes this bash more than a little unusual is that it ain't in Silicon Valley, it's in Topeka, Kansas, the home of NewTek. Tim Jenison, 38, technical wizard, and Paul Montgomery, 33, the self-proclaimed "PT Barnum of NewTek" (NewTek doesn't give job titles), have been nestled away here with a team of digital video hackers making the Video Toaster. The Toaster is a system of wildly inexpensive hardware and software that fits into a Commodore Amiga computer. It lets the average guy with home video equipment make video that looks nearly as good as the pros'. In the four years since its release, the Toaster has created an industry and leveled the field for independent video producers while it redefined the look of network television.

1993, A Monster Year for NewTek

There was a lot to celebrate. NewTek earned accolades from the business and broadcast communities alike. It was selected as one of the "25 Cool Companies" in Fortune's 1994 Information Technology issue, right along with Thinking Machines, Cygnus Support, Silicon Graphics, Interval Research, and Continuum Database. Fortune estimated the privately held company's sales – generated by moving more than 60,000 Video Toasters – at US$25 million. In the fourth quarter of 1993, Panasonic began advertising its WJ-MX30 digital video mixer with inserts in the video trade magazines that read "As useful as your Toaster is…."

The Toaster Development Team was honored with a special technical Emmy. Indirectly, they received a second Emmy. Ron Thornton won an Emmy for the special effects in the Babylon 5 pilot, an Emmy normally awarded to a television series. Thornton created the "look" that sold the show on a single Toaster system in his bedroom. A network of Toasters created all the effects shots for the pilot. By the end of 1993, Toaster networks created some or all of the effects shots for seaQuest DSV, Viper, The X-Files, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

NewTek moved to a new office building that put all of the company's 60 employees in one place for the first time. The parking lot is big enough for all the Acura NSXes, Nissan 300 ZXes, and Ferraris, and Jenison can land the helicopter he's been flying there if he cares to. They're planning to put an Internet node in the new building sometime this year to become NewTek.com. They're gearing up for a new campaign to push the concept of Personal Video Production to new heights and new audiences, teaming veteran NewTek product expert Robert Blackwell with new Toaster evangelist Wil Wheaton, whose friends still can't get over the fact he's left the bridge of the Enterprise and streets of LA for an edit studio in the basement of an office building amongst the pastures of Topeka, Kansas.

Also in 1993, NewTek released Toaster 4000 for the Amiga 4000 computer and mammoth hardware and software upgrades to the original Toaster. It announced a new rendering engine for the Toaster – the Screamer – which uses four MIPS R4400 series RISC chips (the same processors in SGI platforms) to reduce 3-D animation rendering times from hours to seconds at another stunningly low price point. Though not a shipping product, by the end of the year, beta Screamers were making the rounds in all the right places.

NewTek received another boost in market recognition via the movie theaters. The man who built the first wire-wrapped Toaster, engineer Brad Carvey, 42, is Dana Carvey's brother. Brad was Dana's model for the character of Garth Algar, and was called in to help set-dress Garth's bedroom for Wayne's World 2. Not surprisingly, NewTek and Toaster promotional items appeared in Garth's bedroom, and Garth wore a Toaster T-shirt in several of the movie's scenes.

Crass commercialism? Gross product-pushing nepotism? Perhaps, but not totally. Just ask the Garth Algar "nerd-alikes" who bought Toasters to make their own Wayne's World shows and are now making big bucks and "real TV." Toaster users include former butchers turned video makers, high school-age logo animators and commercial producers, former video salespeople now animating for Spielberg, and a former pro skateboarder who turned first to professional wrestling and finally to video production after he was blinded in an automobile accident.

Beginnings

"It started with this odd computer called the Amiga," says Montgomery.

In August 1985, Byte magazine ran a preview of a soon-to-be-released personal computer from Commodore called the Amiga. Inside the Amiga was a very unconventional set of chips that gave the system more graphics and animation power than anything on the market. It also had a genlock circuit (which allows you to lay titles and graphics on top of video) and a "video-out" jack. To a certain type of user, these departures from standard computer design made the Amiga very attractive indeed.

At that time, Jenison was a freelance designer and programmer and one of the principals in a company called Colorware, which developed products for Tandy. Colorware "did video digitizers, paint programs, graphics things," says Jenison. The Byte preview caught his attention. "What jumped out at me was that it had an NTSC output and a genlock circuit that allowed the computer to synchronize to an outside video signal," Jenison recalls. "I saw potential for video production. So I ordered one right away and was the first kid in Topeka to have one."

Montgomery was in real estate and an "early adopter" heavy into video. He was a Cartrivision owner (a US-made pre-Beta home VCR precursor that sold from 1972 to 1974) who made black-and-white home videos and moved up to camcorders when they came out. Yet his videos didn't look good enough; he wanted to make cool videos, just like the pros.

In the early 1980s, Montgomery went shopping for equipment to spice up his tapes. "I went into a Radio Shack to look at their special effects generator and I said 'Wow $450, this looks great! Can I fade from one image to another?' The guy says,

"'No, no way.'

"'Can I do fades?'

"'Yeah, you can fade to black.'

"'Can it do anything else?'

"'Yeah, fade to red or green.'

"'Well, that's not so cool. What about squeezing the image and flipping it?'

"'No, no way. That takes a $100,000 piece of equipment. You're never gonna find that here.'"

Montgomery left Radio Shack dissatisfied.

"When I read about the Amiga I said 'Jesus, this is the computer I've been waiting for.'"

Montgomery met Carvey for the first time in a Computerland store in September of 1985, checking out the Amigas. "Ever since I was a kid I always wanted to be an engineer," says Carvey. "My idea of an engineer is somebody who makes things, builds them, and gets them to work." According to brother Dana's comedy routines, Brad was repairing home appliances at age 6 with a butter knife as his only tool.

After the store closed, Carvey and Montgomery talked about video and computers in a Denny's restaurant until 1 a.m.

Jenison Makes His First Product

"I whipped up a video digitizer, just as a fun project, and I got a black- and-white image up on the screen," says Jenison. At that time, graphics on computers were pretty archaic. To actually see a photograph up on the screen of a personal computer was pretty cool…. I played around with a color wheel to get RGBcolor and started getting full-color images on the screen. I knew that this was a great product so I sold out my interest in this other company and started a new company to make video things for the Amiga.

"I had three demo pictures on a diskette and I ran into this guy from Commodore, Jeff Bruette. He said, 'This is pretty good, do you mind if I make a copy of this and take it back to show the guys at Commodore?' So I said, 'Well, you can, but my phone number is on that disk in a Read Me file. So don't pass it along.' He said, 'Don't worry, I won't duplicate it.' Within 24 hours, my phone started ringing. This thing was all across the country," says Jenison.

While Jenison was whipping up his digitizer, Montgomery had become a little disenchanted with his Amiga. He hadn't seen any applications that lived up to his expectations of what the system could do. Jenison's disk changed all that.

"The first thing I saw on the Amiga was these amazing pictures on the screen," says Montgomery. "Brad Carvey came over to my house and said, 'You're not gonna believe what you're about to see. You will see these images and you'll probably cry.' He put the disk in and there was silence. It was almost a religious experience. Something had changed. There was a shift. Computers weren't supposed to do this."

Jenison says, "The first guy to call me was Paul Montgomery. He called from San Jose, California, and said, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'Where the hell's Topeka? Who the hell are you? What the hell are these pictures from? And when can I get one?'"

Jenison's digitizer, DigiView, was a great success. It would go through four release versions and spawn DigiPaint, a companion paint program. Though NewTek does not announce sales figures, Montgomery says that over 100,000 units sold and believes that DigiView is the best-selling image capture device, on any platform, in the history of computing. With one of the first three demo pictures a Playboy cover, DigiView may also have contributed significantly to the beginnings of the digitized nude culture of cyberspace.

Time marched on. While NewTek sold DigiView, Montgomery started FAUG, the First Amiga User's Group, in California. He and Jenison talked on the phone daily, and Jenison flew up for several of the 600-member meetings. Carvey moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his wife would begin work on a doctorate in anthropology. Montgomery went to work for Electronic Arts, which had positioned itself as the company that would push the Amiga, and personal computing, to new heights. Instead, according to Montgomery, they ended up being more concerned with porting product from the Amiga to the Apple IIGS. Frustrated, he resigned from Electronic Arts and moved to Topeka in 1987.

About the time Montgomery moved to Topeka, Jenison was ready to start developing new products. DigiView and DigiPaint were cash cows that would fund NewTek's future.

"There were cool things inside this computer once you started looking into it," says Jenison. "It's what we computer nerds call 'hackable.' You could do all these creative things inside of it just with software. It was like that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial: 'Hey you got video in my computer! Hey you got computer in my video!'

"So, I had a long list of things I could develop for the Amiga and one was the 'Video Black Box.' Paul said, 'Yeah yeah, that's the one.' The idea was to try to do as much of the video production job as possible using the computer technology. In those days video equipment was very specialized hardware. The engineers would sit down at the drawing board and say 'OK this video signal needs to do this and this.' I felt that with the Amiga you could do a lot of work in the computer because of the special chips. You'd still need some hardware to do the high-speed stuff but there'd be a real synergy between the Amiga, the other hardware, and the software.

"The first idea was that you could do complicated wipes from one source to another and have a character generator. So Paul said 'What about squeezing the image and flipping it?'

"I said, 'No, no way. That (would take) a $100,000 piece of equipment.'

"'Okay,' said Paul, 'yeah I knew that. But it would be really cool if you could do that.'

"So I got to thinking about it and I figured a way to do it. That was the start of the Toaster prototype."

It was at this point that Montgomery suggested that Jenison meet Carvey, who was working for Research in Safety and Safeguards at Sandia Labs in New Mexico at the time. Carvey had been building surveillance robots, working on robot vision and robots guided by stripes of "Color Braille" to guide them along on the road. He also worked on a multiresolution video board that would define sampling frequencies and update the scan rates pixel by pixel.

"So," says Jenison, "we got together with Brad at a Valentino's restaurant, a pizza place, and started drawing block diagrams on placemats."

Then Carvey flew home to Albuquerque. He's been flying to Topeka for a week at a time, every month or so, ever since. "The very first Toaster was just supposed to be an effects box," says Carvey. "I had drawn the schematic and built the board after numerous discussions with Tim and then Tim and software engineer Steve Kell came out to my house and got it working. They came out on a Thursday and I guess by Friday or Saturday we had it doing effects. Tuesday they flew back to Topeka with a barely functioning board. But we were real excited. I mean the very first time the video was flipping around we knew it was gonna work and that basically Tim's concept was proven. That was October 1987. In November 1987 we showed it at Comdex. It caused a big stir."

Almost as valuable to NewTek was showing a second prototype product that caused no stir, DigiView Pro. NewTek was also demonstrating a full-motion color video and sound clip of then-sales manager Laura Longfellow. The clip ran at fifteen frames per second and filled 80 percent of the screen coming off an 880K floppy. Almost no one stopped to look at it, even with signs explaining what it was.

"The reaction to the digital video stuff was like a wet dishrag," says Jenison. "DigiView Pro was gonna be like a Video Spigot and QuickTime, only better, for $295 in 1987. No one cared."

"The best way to describe the Amiga market," says Montgomery, "is that things you're just hearing about on the PC and saw a year or so ago on the Macintosh, we were talking about in 1986. Being from the Amiga market is like being from the future. We've gone through it all. We read MacWEEK or PC Computing and say 'Ha, ha, ha aren't these companies cute. Look, they're thinking what we thought. Boy, they're in for a surprise.'"

After the prototype was unveiled in 1987, NewTek's research and development arm, Alcatraz, went into full swing. Separated from the main offices, in a building marked with hazardous waste signs to keep the curious away, programmers and hardware engineers labored away to get the Toaster just right. It took three years to release a shipping version of the Toaster. What took all that time? Standards: Jenison's and the government's.

The Government's Standards

Technically, any VHS deck can be connected to your local network affiliate's transmitter and start broadcasting. Legally, that's a violation of FCC regs. Just because a signal can be viewed on a US television doesn't mean it's broadcast standard. Part of that has to do with reasonable concerns over quality. If you start with a picture as bad as the one you get from a two-head $199 consumer VHS player playing an eight-hour VHS tape, you'll end up broadcasting mud.

On the other hand, historically, the standard has also been used as a means to keep the average guy from making and/or broadcasting programming. Before the days of high-end camcorders and America's Funniest Home Videos, anything shot on a nonbroadcast quality camera or recorded with a nonbroadcast quality deck was the broadcast equivalent of a leper. Unless, of course, it was news so hot (Rodney King) that the networks were dying to air it.

Jenison's Standards

"We wanted the Toaster," explains Jenison, "because we wanted to make our own shows. We knew we needed certain things to get that television look."

"The first board," says Carvey, "wrapped video around a ball and bounced the ball around the screen. It would flip video upside down, do wipes, that sort of thing. Then Tim continually added things that were necessary: an alpha channel so he could do drop shadows, a luminance key so that he could key people over stuff. A lot of the software wasn't intended to ship with the Toaster. It was gonna be an effects box that would grow into other products. But because the Toaster kept changing, a lot of those things that were gonna be additional products added later were included with the shipping product."

The Video Toaster gives the user a four-input switcher, two 24-bit frame buffers, a luminance keyer (the ability to lay live video over computer graphics, a la the TV weatherman), and an internal genlock. All this allows the user to switch between any combination of video channels and still images. Included are the switcher software (bank after bank of animated wipes, some of which cannot be duplicated on any current system at any price point, it's also the part of the Toaster that performs the Digital Video Effects, the squishing and flipping of video Montgomery wanted); Toaster CG (a character generator used for creating titles and text overlays); Toaster Paint (a 24-bit paint program with its roots in DigiPaint); Chroma F/X (color-image processing); and Lightwave 3D (a 3-D animation and rendering package).

Why bother loading a consumer product so heavily? After all, the Video Toaster's suggested retail price is less than $2,400.

"My mother does not know what 3-D rendering, CG, a switcher, a still store, or digital video effects are," says Montgomery. "But if they're missing from a show she's watching, she'll say 'This show's not very good. It doesn't seem very professional to me.' If they're all there, the show looks right. The goal became to get those tools into the hands of the average person; everything but edit control and the VCRs are in this box."

"To get that look was a lot of hard work too," says Jenison. "Even with the chips in the Amiga, the computer was just borderline. So we had to write everything in assembly language to squeeze every last drop of speed out of the computer. It takes about ten times longer to write a program in assembly. We also had to develop this hardware to take over where the computer wasn't fast enough."

NewTek also brought in some of the best video developers in the Amiga market. They tapped Allen Hastings to write the 3-D renderer that would become Lightwave. Hastings had written an earlier, popular 3-D animation program on the Amiga called Videoscape 3D.

Daniel Kaye and Peter Tjeerdsma, the principals of Elan Design, eventually joined the Alcatraz team. Elan Design had produced two popular performance/presentation programs for the Amiga, INVISION and Performer. INVISION worked with a low-resolution, real-time video board called LIVE from A-Squared to produce video manipulations, some of which are the forebears of the Toaster's Chroma F/X, and animation in real time. Once they arrived at NewTek, they became integrated into Alcatraz. Tjeerdsma created the F/X team and Kaye became one of the driving forces behind interface design and aesthetics of all kinds at NewTek. He is also one of the forces that keeps expanding NewTek's Hollywood connections.

Finally, the Toaster was released in December 1990. The first NewTek Christmas party, a quiet affair in a local tavern, was held to celebrate the release.

Today's Emerging Desktop Video Market

"The desktop video market didn't just appear today," says Lou Wallace, editor-in-chief of Desktop-Video World magazine, "It's been growing for several years, legitimized by the Toaster as the first usable, affordable system for a personal computer. There are all kinds of studies showing the DTV market to be anywhere from several billion to gazillions of dollars. You've got to take that with some grains of salt, but there's no question that it's growing rapidly. Desktop video people are in corporate communication departments, art agencies, educational markets, even medical and government markets, as well as the traditional video market and the event videographers. People who used to work for industrial (post- production) houses are now striking out on their own."

The writing was on the wall. The lines between high-end consumer and industrial, even consumer and broadcast, equipment have been softening ever since. Before the Toaster, the dream of many amateur videographers was to one day work in or, if he won the lottery, own a broadcast quality A/B roll video editing studio. An A/B roll studio has two or more input decks that can be used to mix different video clips and graphics seamlessly. That dream cost anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000, depending on whom you talked to, what catalogue you used, and where you were willing to compromise.

After the Toaster, assuming you are starting from scratch with no decks, no computers, no nothing, the dream costs from $10,000 to $15,000, depending on whom you talk to, what catalogue you use, and where you are willing to compromise. If you can buy a new car, or get a loan for one, you can start your own industrial or broadcast video business for fun and profit. That's a hell of a thing.

Montgomery made his market. He "PT Barnumed" the Toaster into more rings than most people were willing to believe was possible. Case in point: the city of Rochester, New York, one of the 50 largest cities in the country, but on the small end of the list. There are probably hundreds of Toaster owners there. Toasters can be found in the city's high schools, Rochester Institute of Technology's Film School, and public access and government cable channels' production suites. On the local broadcast airwaves at least two of the three network affiliates use Toasters in daily production, and probably a third of the locally produced commercials contain distinctive Toaster wipes. In industry, Toasters have been seen in the labs of Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, and in Xerox's internal video suite. That doesn't begin to list the number of smaller corporations, freelancers, teachers, and hobbyists who have them.

"Suppose the Toaster had shipped," says Jenison, "but it wasn't up to specs, or there was something that didn't look right. It would have been a totally different animal."

"The mind-set (of a Video Toaster owner) is not 'We bought this cheap thing and this cheap thing is good enough to make tapes for grandma let's do it,'" says Montgomery. "The mind-set is 'We're buying the same equipment that is used at the high end.' Look at (Steven Harris Jr). He's this high school kid whose father bought a Toaster. He starts making computer animations with Lightwave. That same tool that his father can buy is good enough to get him on the air. Now he's doing animations for big corporations, local television, and making a lot of money. For his 16th birthday he bought himself his first Mercedes. The same guys can start in their garage and end up working for Spielberg."

Changes in the Desktop Video Market

Today, there are two issues that NewTek and the Video Toaster need to address if the company is to respond to the other DTV systems and the quickly growing market. Some video industry watchers believe these factors may edge NewTek out of the market.

1. Media. Some of the other high-end, higher ticket systems offer functionality that NewTek doesn't. Rather than being multiple-deck videotape-based systems, they're nonlinear editing systems. They convert the video signal to digital, hard drive-storable and editable information. Nonlinear makes editing as easy as word processing. Just dump the original video to disk, edit, and dump it back to tape. No sophisticated deck control needed. Some third-party vendors have developed parts of the nonlinear solution for the Toaster, but nothing as functional and as fast as the Avid and Matrox systems have. They used to be a lot more expensive than a Toaster system, but not for long.

"Now the growth area is in the changeover from analog to digital, not just for effects and animation but for nonlinear editing, which requires large storage," says Lou Wallace. "Tape isn't gonna go away overnight, but the push for digital is getting stronger. So there's real momentum for DTV. Analog video equipment is still coming down in price but not as significantly as fast, high-volume digital storage. Analog video equipment is somewhat cheaper than it was three years ago, but nonlinear editing equipment is a tenth of the price it was, following the general computer market."

2. Platform. The numbers say it's becoming primarily an MS-DOS/Windows kind of world. The Mac will be around for a while at least. The PowerPCs and Indys of the world are on their way. It's easy to put video onto an Indy (though still expensive to edit it, add animation, or get it back out again). Meanwhile the Toaster is still an Amiga-based system.

Commodore and NewTek do communicate on the standards for the next Amiga system. But Commodore is also pushing Amiga technology in CD32, its newest CD-ROM game machine, and is involved in set-top terminal negotiations with other companies. As Jeff Porter, Commodore vice president of technical development, says, "People are prototyping with high-end systems to discover what services they want to deliver. But they're not going to want to spend those dollars once they are past the prototype stage. We've been delivering solid video-compatible computing longer than anyone at a lower price point than anyone." So Amiga technology may live on, but perhaps not as Amiga computers. If there's no Amiga box, is there no Toaster, no NewTek?

To sum it all up, in the desktop video market it seems that everyone else is getting faster, cheaper, and more digital than the Toaster. The other guys' systems are based on more commercially viable platforms. Does this mean the beginning of the end for NewTek?

Don't count on it.

The Future

NewTek introduced its first non-Amiga product for the Toaster at the 1993 SIGGRAPH convention. The unveiling of the Screamer was preceded by a Mark Randal video blitz. NewTek's marketing wordsmith writes every ad and every tape for NewTek (with the exception of the legendary "Penn and Teller's Guide to Video Toaster Etiquette" seen at NewTek's trade show booths – that tape came about by way of Penn's instant liking of and strong friendship with Jenison, and Teller's "inclination to help those taking power from the few to the many"; Jenison, Penn, and Teller have equally Jeffersonian points of view). In the tape, Randal details the marvelous hobbies one can take up while waiting for one's animation to render – like chess by mail or learning how to ask "When will the picture appear?" and "What machine costs more than a house?" in Spanish.

The Screamer is a Windows NT device. The user never sees any difference in the operating system of the Toaster, he just sees frames rendering in seconds instead of hours. It's not a real-time box like the SGI system, even though it uses the same processors as the Indigo systems. On the other hand, a loaded Screamer, plus a loaded Amiga 4000 with a Toaster and all the bells and whistles, will run about 20 percent of the price of a four-processor Indigo Challenger.

The inspiration for the Screamer came from the needs of the Hollywood community. Under the tremendous deadlines of network television production, the folks at Amblin had networked 40 Toaster systems together to render all the scenes they needed as fast as they needed them.

"We used as much off-the-shelf as we could for the prototype Screamers," says Montgomery. "The shipping Screamer will be about 50 percent off-the- shelf and 50 percent Tim-designed. Right now, one Toaster with one Screamer equals about 40 networked Toasters. We figure that five or six networked Screamers will equal the Jurassic Park computing power. The shipping Screamer will be under $10,000 retail."

"SGI is a company based on huge margins and huge cabinets," says Jenison. "They have these huge cabinets and then down in the corner is the processor. You could put twelve cases of beer inside them if they had a compressor. To be fair to Silicon Graphics, our cost to make the Screamer and support it is a lot less than the support that goes into one of their boxes. We knew we didn't have to build a company like SGI. Obviously they do a number of things, and their profits support those other products. We knew we only had to do one thing, render Lightwave as fast as possible."

"We're a volume business and they're a margin business," says Montgomery. "Look at the cost of 3-D rendering packages out there: $20,000, $40,000. Obviously that can't last."

"SGI is going after Apple to take away their high-end media production and multimedia market," says Lou Wallace. "They're not interested in the Toaster's market. As far as the Screamer goes, I see it as defensive rather than offensive. It will help them protect their high-end market primarily, and for the moment, it's not a product. They'll ship a few hundred of these things. Its big impact is NewTek's first step off the Amiga."

Even so, there have been a lot of Toaster owners talking about chipping in to share a Screamer, setting up service bureaus, or talking their spouses into another mortgage.

But in the long run, the folks at NewTek aren't merely fired by the impact Lightwave and the Toaster have had in Hollywood. The average Toaster user making money with his system builds a business as an all-around video producer, not a Hollywood special effects producer.

"3-D doesn't drive the Toaster," says Jenison. "It's bought for the video tools. Most of our customers buy it to do titles and wipes. Lightwave does produce the most amazing results you can get from the Toaster. But it takes time and talent. The exciting thing is, slowly, some of the people who bought a Toaster to title get into 3-D. They probably never would have been a customer for a 3-D workstation and now they're doing fantastic things."

So the Toaster will continue to be all things to all video producers, even more so. After all, these are the developers from the future. The idea of competing with nonlinear editing systems driven by digital video doesn't intimidate them. Remember, these are the guys who had 80 percent full- screen digital video and stereo audio running off a floppy disk on a 68000 processor machine in 1987.

"We've of course looked at nonlinear," says Montgomery. "There are subsystems in the hardware that haven't even been tapped yet."

"You have to remember that the Toaster was designed six years ago using 1987 technology," says Jenison. "We haven't been sitting still. We're aimed at doing more and more inside the box and we have a six-year head start on these other people. We knew that there would be competitors. If a product is out there, a few years later there will be copycats. Meanwhile, where we'll be in 1994 will be really interesting. We could tell you…but then we'd have to shoot you."

(Life in the computer and video industry is fast and furious. As we went to press, we were informed that Paul Montgomery, Mark Randal, Daniel Kaye, Brad Carvey, Wil Wheaton, and Robert Blackwell were no longer with NewTek. They have gone on to other ventures. And at the National Association of Broadcasters show, NewTek unveiled a "tapeless" editing system.)

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